BitTorrent takes on the cloud with new SoShare service

It's been a long and eventful journey for BitTorrent, which is taking steps to end its legacy as an infamous P2P file-sharing platform by morphing into a legitimate technology firm targeting the enterprise sector.

Accordingly, BitTorrent has launched SoShare, a service that allows users send and receive large files. To lure more users, the company is making the first terabyte of the file-transaction free of cost. The service, which is now available in beta, works with Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer for Windows and Safari for Mac.

The new service will be competing against the likes of DropBox, YouSendIt, Box as well as other cloud storage and file transfer services as it tries to win over creative professionals with a need for transferring large amounts of data.

“For now, we’re going into the public beta without fees,” said Catherine Meek, BitTorrent’s director of product strategy, in an email to TechCrunch.

“Leveraging the distributed BitTorrent protocol has helped keep our costs low. We’ll be looking at a few options along the way, but building something that is reliable and adds value to the user is our primary objective,” she added.

It is worth mentioning here that even though BitTorrent calls it a file-sharing service, SoShare actually stores a copy of the file in the cloud for "reliable access."